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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 15, 2023
> In the network automation era, Python is the de facto language to automate repetitive network tasks on a global scale. Network engineers can use a plethora of tools during their automation journey, including interpreters and integrated development environment, or IDE, tools.
> I've been for a long time an "applied cryptography passive enthusiast", following various blogs and reading various introductory articles on the subject, but I have newer dug deeper or tried to do anything myself (hence the qualification "passive").
> However, since a year or so, I've started playing, first in my mind then in proof-of-concept code, with various ideas, especially related to long term encryption or encryption in automation scenarios, thus leaning towards "applied cryptography active hobbyist".
> About at the same time, I've started following closer some of the most prominent public writers on the topic. They might not necessarily be cryptographers themselves, however they are able to translate the various primitives, schemes, constructs, and their properties, into plain English.
> Thus, for anyone seriously wanting to start experimenting with cryptography (which has nothing to do with "crypto", that is yet another alias for ponzi-schemes), I wanted to highlight some of these information sources.
> Following that, I will also list a few articles that I consider are good introductory topics, or generic enough to be applicable in a broader sense.
> As Half-Life modding matured, some really interesting inventions appeared. MetaMod was a C++ framework that interposed itself between the server binary and the actual mod DLL, allowing you to inject custom behaviour into an existing mod. I didn’t understand enough C++ to write MetaMod plugins, but that didn’t matter: AMX Mod and later AMX Mod X let you write custom plugins using a simpler C-style language called Pawn (known back then as “Small”). This enabled an explosion of ways for operators to tweak their game servers: quality-of-life improvements for players, reserved player slots for members, and delightfully bonkers gameplay changes. I remember having my mind blown the first time I stumbled upon a game of CS with a class-based perks system, inspired by Warcraft 3, and that was just one instance of the creativity that came from the AMX(X) modding scenes.
> And with the Half-Life-specific background covered, we are now ready to talk about NS: Combat and my gloriously dumb contribution to the AMXX world.
> Having code you can inspect, poke at, tweak, and then immediately run is a kind of super power. Fast, iterative feedback loops are incredibly empowering. This is what I was getting at when I wrote about cheating entropy by writing vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS: [...]
> In our profession, it’s common to work on an unfamiliar codebase. It happens every time one joins a new project or even needs to work on a previously untouched part in big ones. This occurrence is not limited to a developer having to fix a bug; it can be a solution architect having to design a new feature or an OpenSource contributor working on a GitHub issue in their free time. Hence, I want to describe how I approach the situation so it can benefit others.
> Certain groups prefer static linking or mostly static linking for the sake of deployment convenience and performance. In scenarios where the distributed program contains a significant amount of code (related: software bloat), employing full or mostly static linking can result in very large executable files. Consequently, certain relocations may be close to the distance limit, and even a minor disruption can trigger relocation overflow linker errors.
> Details can be found in the mentioned reference. The rest of the post illustrates with examples how to compute “sandwich” estimates in R, and why you may want to do so.
> "I've made the very difficult decision to reduce our workforce by about 10 per cent per cent or 58 employees. This is painful for them, and we are supporting those employees through this transition with severance packages, extensions of healthcare benefits, and outplacement services," the CEO said in a statement.
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